The India R&D centre?s software innovations are playing a key role in Marissa Mayer?s attempt to revitalise Yahoo?s products, even as it tries its hand at creating products end-to-end
Yahoo in its comeback bid in the fast changing internet world, recently carried out a radical revamp of its trump card, the home page, which is now similar to the Facebook feeds and also inculcates the users? preferences. Some of these most critical innovations were done out of the India R&D centre in Bangalore, the second largest outside Yahoo?s US headquarters.
The internet giant, which claims more than 700 million unique visitors, has in the recent past also revamped its Mail and Image search under its new chief Marissa Mayer, a former top Google executive. Shouvick Mukherjee, who headed the 2,000 plus strong India R&D centre till April this year, spearheaded the India operation for the global home page innovation, which according to him, is one of the best done out of the India centre. He has since moved to US as the vice president for consumer platforms.
The new homepage, which is yet to be launched in India, figures out what the users? interests are apart from having lot of apps like for weather and stock market quotes, which can also be customised. The news feeds can be scrolled down infinitely and the page does Facebook integration and notifies friends? birthdays. ?It is what is called discovery, once you are in it you just keep doing it, it?s very difficult to get out of it,? says Mukherjee. The new homepage has personalised top scores that users watch out for, such as Flickr, featured videos, birthdays and horoscopes.
?The whole social content and what gets shown and not on the visitor?s homepage are done out of India. All the way from what gets personalised, how we put social on top of it and the integration based on users? habit,? he says.
The other area where the India team has worked is on the image search. ?In terms of preparing what to recommend, how to show the image and how do you make sure that what is a high quality image are all done out of India including how you ensure that you understand user bandwidth and figure out what type of image is to be shown,? he says. ?There are local products that we develop for the India market to start with,? he says, citing the example of Yahoo cricket which is a local product that had a global impact. ?For instance in cricket, with the information on the type of ground and type of weather, we can predict what would be the outcome of a match and for a batsman. Those kind of predictions work in other products,? he says.
Mukherjee points out that the company?s India centre has transformed from being an outsourcing hub to an innovation hub.
According to Mukherjee, the India employees are becoming conscious about innovation and what they are building. ?They are putting in time and effort in creating innovation and then going after final products. I think most people actually are domain experts,? he says .
Commenting on the innovation in the mobiles and apps space, Mukherjee says that there cannot be an app for every single product that a company is planning, even if it is their priority. ?Our mode of thinking is how do we create a differentiating experience for the daily users as compared to just having apps for the sake of apps.?
He feels that mobile gives different set of challenges and opportunities in advertising. ?You need to leverage on the multiple interactions on a touch screen, which could be used to innovate on various advertisement opportunities.? For instance, PolyAds, an online display ad format developed at the India centre shows multiple ads in a single ad slot in ?3D-Cube experience?. It has configurable features, support for video, audio and social sharing which will increase Yahoo?s role in the mobile advertising space.
According to him, innovation has to move with partnership. For instance, in the new homepage most of the news articles that show up may come from Facebook, which in turn would show a news article from Yahoo as a trending item. ?We are getting you what we are good at and leveraging others which could compliment us.?
